Dragon Ball is at the point where, at only 16 episodes left, I’m already beginning to miss it. I know that I lose a lot of cred for admitting to liking Dragon Ball, but I think that part of that is based on the fact that Dragon Ball Z came out to the Western World first. One friend I was talking to said that he had assumed that it was more of the same.

Well, it’s not! Things that would actually be covered in Dragon Ball – say, character relationships – are reduced to “yeah, [x] happened while you were sleeping” ([x] being characters getting married and having children and whatever … despite the sense that these people would never have touched each other before).

But enough about Z, how about this next foray into the Tenkaichi Tournament? Boy, the time sure does fly when you watch a million episodes of this show in a week.

Now that is how you make a spot of Dragon Ball! With a legitimate villain who is capable enacting his plans for world domination! With a villain who can back up his pride most of the time! With a villain who can spit eggs!

… but not with Pilaf doing much in the way of good. But you can’t win all of the battles that you fight.

Ah, a tournament saga to get Dragon Ball in line. One could accuse a tournament of being repetitive, but it’s an effective way to get characters together into a structured event without making weird diversions into nothingness. On top of that, this arc has a great ending – an ending which would have been a surprise had I not already known of it, and had the colour design and editing not made it clear that something was going down.

I was wrong about the division of the sets: the Fortuneteller Baba set starts at a pretty good episode to continue this part of the story, with the hangover from the previous set lasting mere seconds that would not really have been justified on the previous set.

This is fun stuff because it’s not very high concept and, before it launches into another storyline, a few stand alone episodes are offered. Elsewhere they might be considered “filler” (did I ever say that I hate that word? For I do, with every fibre of my being), but here they’re an entertaining break from relentless storylines involving immortal homosexuals who get killed by the tongues of rogue Chinese assassins.

I have a feeling that those dastards at Funimation and Madman actually cut the Red Ribbon arc one episode shy on this release so that they could say that it covers all of Commander Red, and ends when he does.
The next set – the Fortuneteller Baba set – looks like, from its description, that it is the true end of the Red Ribbon Army. That is until Dr. Gero brings them back for one of the better DBZ arcs. It’s too bad that damned Frieza had to come in and mess the hell out of that story.

What? Oh, yeah, the Commander Red Saga. I think I’ve distilled the essence of what Dragon Ball has lost. Join me on that ride!